Philadelphia’s parks answer to two rivers and to a plan drawn in 1682, when William Penn’s surveyor set five public squares into the grid; Rittenhouse Square and Franklin Square still keep their diagonals. The Schuylkill produced the other tradition — East Fairmount Park was bought from 1844 onward not for recreation but to push industry off the slopes above the city’s water intake, and the Philadelphia Zoo stands on that same park land across the river. Northwest of everything, Wissahickon Valley Park is a forested gorge where you can walk an hour without hearing an engine.
Scale is the other axis, running from half an acre to two thousand. JFK Plaza (Love Park) and Dilworth Park are hard civic squares laid over transit tunnels beside City Hall and rebuilt flush with the sidewalk; Spruce Street Harbor Park is a summer village of hammocks and moored barges put up on the Delaware in late May and taken down in the fall; FDR Park spreads Olmsted lagoons across filled tidal marsh in the far south. Choose by the kind of ground you want underfoot, and how far you will go for it.
At a glance
| # | Place | Score | Reviews | Stands out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Independence National Historical Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 26 591 | Editors' pick |
| 2 | Philadelphia Zoo | ⭐ 9.1 | 22 647 | — |
| 3 | JFK Plaza (Love Park) | ⭐ 9.1 | 15 950 | — |
| 4 | Dilworth Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 10 022 | — |
| 5 | Spruce Street Harbor Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 8 278 | — |
| 6 | Wissahickon Valley Park | ⭐ 9.7 | 6 934 | People's favorite |
| 7 | Rittenhouse Square | ⭐ 9.5 | 6 848 | — |
| 8 | East Fairmount Park | ⭐ 9.3 | 5 356 | — |
| 9 | Franklin Square | ⭐ 9.3 | 5 247 | — |
| 10 | FDR Park | ⭐ 9.1 | 5 167 | — |
Highlights
-
Editors' pick:
Independence National Historical Park -
People's favorite:
Wissahickon Valley Park
Opening hours
Open around the clock: Rittenhouse Square.
Open late: JFK Plaza (Love Park), Dilworth Park, Spruce Street Harbor Park, Rittenhouse Square, East Fairmount Park, Franklin Square.
Open early, from 8am or sooner: JFK Plaza (Love Park), Dilworth Park, Wissahickon Valley Park, Rittenhouse Square, East Fairmount Park, FDR Park.
Check the hours before you set out — they shift on holidays and out of season.
Full ranking
1. Independence National Historical Park · ⭐ 9.3
(26591 reviews)
+7 photos
Philadelphia, PA 19106, United States
This is not a city park. Independence National Historical Park is a unit of the National Park Service, roughly 55 acres of federal land in the oldest quarter of Philadelphia, staffed by uniformed rangers under the Department of the Interior rather than by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. Inside a handful of blocks the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Ind…
2. Philadelphia Zoo · ⭐ 9.1
(22647 reviews)
+7 photos
3400 W Girard Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19104, United States
A word of warning about the label: this is not a public park you can wander into. The Philadelphia Zoo is a ticketed attraction run by the Zoological Society of Philadelphia, a private nonprofit, on 42 acres of Fairmount Park land on the west bank of the Schuylkill River. It carries a distinction no other American institution can claim — the Society received its charter on Marc…
3. JFK Plaza (Love Park) · ⭐ 9.1
(15950 reviews)
+7 photos
1501 John F Kennedy Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19102, United States
Start with what it actually is, because the name misleads. This is not a park in any landscape sense: it is John F. Kennedy Plaza, a hard public square of about half an acre, built in 1965 as the roof of an underground parking garage and operated by Philadelphia Parks and Recreation. It was planned by the city's legendary planning director Edmund Bacon together with architect V…
4. Dilworth Park · ⭐ 9.3
(10022 reviews)
+7 photos
1 S 15th St, Philadelphia, PA 19102, United States
Dilworth Park is about 120,500 square feet — call it two and three-quarter acres — of lawn, fountain and paving wrapped around the western face of Philadelphia City Hall, and it is one of the most instructive pieces of recent civic design in America. It sits on Center Square, one of the five public squares that surveyor Thomas Holme drew into William Penn's plan for the city in…
5. Spruce Street Harbor Park · ⭐ 9.3
(8278 reviews)
+7 photos
301 S Christopher Columbus Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19106, United States
This one comes with an important qualification: it is not a permanent park and it is not run by the city. Spruce Street Harbor Park is a seasonal installation at Penn's Landing on the Delaware River, built fresh each year and taken down again at the end of the season, operated by the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation, the nonprofit created in 2009 to manage Philadelphia's c…
6. Wissahickon Valley Park · ⭐ 9.7
(6934 reviews)
+7 photos
Valley Green Rd, Philadelphia, PA 19128, United States
Roughly two thousand acres of forested gorge in northwest Philadelphia, cut by a creek that falls more than a hundred feet over its last seven miles. The valley became public land in 1867, when the state legislature folded it into Fairmount Park to keep sewage and mill waste out of the city's drinking water, and its wooded core was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1964…
7. Rittenhouse Square · ⭐ 9.5
(6848 reviews)
+7 photos
1800 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19103, United States
Six acres of plane trees, balustrades and diagonal walks that function as the front garden of Center City. It is worth being precise about what this place is: Rittenhouse Square is not a park in the administrative sense but one of the five public squares laid out in William Penn's 1682 plan for Philadelphia and drawn by his surveyor Thomas Holme. It is city land, managed by Phi…
8. East Fairmount Park · ⭐ 9.3
(5356 reviews)
+7 photos
2839 W Glenwood Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19121, United States
The east bank of the Schuylkill, from the museum hill north to the city line, holds the original and more historically loaded half of Fairmount Park. Together the two banks total 2,052 acres; the east side is the smaller, steeper, older one, and it is where the whole idea began. Philadelphia did not buy this ground for recreation. It bought it in 1844 to keep tanneries, mills a…
9. Franklin Square · ⭐ 9.3
(5247 reviews)
+7 photos
200 N 6th St, Philadelphia, PA 19106, United States
Seven and a half acres wedged between Old City, Chinatown and Callowhill, and like Rittenhouse it is formally a square rather than a park: one of the five public squares William Penn set aside in his 1682 plan and Thomas Holme drew in 1683. It began as the North East Publick Square and was renamed for Benjamin Franklin in 1825. The distinction matters for a second reason too. F…
«I visited on a Monday morning, and it was quiet. I was able to take some pictures and was…»
10. FDR Park · ⭐ 9.1
(5167 reviews)
+7 photos
1500 Pattison Avenue &, S Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19145, United States
Three hundred and forty-eight acres at the bottom of South Philadelphia, laid out by the Olmsted Brothers on filled tidal marshland between the Schuylkill and the Delaware and opened as League Island Park before it took Franklin Delano Roosevelt's name in 1955. It is a city park under Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, not National Park Service land, with the Fairmount Park Con…
Questions & answers
Which place tops the ranking? Independence National Historical Park — score 9.3/10 (Editors' pick).
How many places are in the list and how were they chosen? The selection includes 10 places chosen by our editors based on rating and reviews.
What is the average rating in the top? 9.3/10 — average score of 10 places in the list.
Which place has the most reviews? Independence National Historical Park — 26591 visitor reviews.
With a small child, take level ground and moving parts: Franklin Square has a carousel, mini golf and playgrounds, and the fountain jets at Dilworth Park sit flush in the paving and are walked through. Runners take the riverside path of East Fairmount Park, or the car-free gravel and steep schist of Wissahickon Valley Park. In a heat wave that gorge is a cool green tunnel; on a summer evening Spruce Street Harbor Park hangs hammocks over the Delaware; for quiet, the shaded lawns of Independence National Historical Park; in winter, the Dilworth Park rink.
The list has edges. The Philadelphia Zoo is enclosed and private; Spruce Street Harbor Park vanishes between fall and late May; FDR Park is partly fenced by a rebuild to 2030. Bike routes, dog runs and lighting go uncovered — the Schuylkill slopes are unlit and the gorge has no signal. Access runs from level-by-design Dilworth Park to schist trails and old stairs, and the map stops at Center City, the riverbanks and the northwest.
See also:
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Sources: Google ratings and reviews, official websites and social media of the places, other open data. Selection and texts by the philadelphia.name editorial team, August 2026.